Fractal Motifs in Africana Arts

This clip of my Seminar at the Harrison Museum of African American Arts in Roanoke, 2 March 2014, (as part of 'The Spirit That Knows Beauty' Exhibition that runs until June) may interest you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANZCdplulBo&feature=youtu.be

Let me know what you think of my inclusion of the sixth principle of inter-connectivity among the elements of fractal designs. Let me know also if you have any tips on how to improve the quality of the video before I upload other clips of the presentation.

Biko Agozino

Why Obasanjo May Be Heading To Hell

By Biko Agozino

General Olusegun Obasanjo who misruled Nigeria for eleven years recently went to Ibadan to curse corrupt and inept rulers of Nigeria, including himself, when he stated: ‘Maybe we are all going to hell’. He may have intended the ‘we’ to refer to all Nigerians but if I understand him correctly, he was referring to those of them with full responsibility for the misgovernmentality that has bedeviled the country before and after independence. No sane person will include blessed and hard-working Nigerians, high achieving individual Nigerians who excel internationally against all the odds and the victimized impoverished Nigerians who suffer a life of hell on earth due to the wicked misrule or incompetence of General Olusegun Obasanjo and his class allies among those who are condemned to hell fire by his own mouth. And some Nigerians have already said Amen to Obasanjo’s self-curse.

Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first president of Nigeria, saw things differently as early as the 1930s when he wrote a ‘Beatitude to the Youth’ of Africa in which he said alliteratively that ‘Blessed Are the Youth’ but in which he also concluded by echoing that ‘Cursed are the Old Africa’ for obstructing the emergence of the Renascent Africa and the new Africa. Then again years before he died, Azikiwe renewed this clear distinction of his by stating that ‘History will vindicate the just’ in a statement that concluded by re-emphasizing that ‘God shall punish the wicked’.

In the curse against himself and people like him, Obasanjo actually revealed the open secret why he suspects that Nigerian misrulers are jinxed. He stated in that rambling self-righteous monologue that he went to visit Mwalimu Julius Nyerere because Nyerere recognized Biafra and Nyerere gave him a simple riddle that he is yet to unravel. According to him, Nyerere told him that his ministers in Tanzania will claim that they were not corrupt and yet their infant children had numerous choice properties in Europe and North America. Why would Nyerere say that to an ethnic war-lord like Obasanjo?

Perhaps Obasanjo was arrogantly campaigning for support for the ongoing genocide against fellow Africans and had the cheek to go and attempt to bribe the revered Nyerere to end his recognition of Biafra. Instead of ending the recognition, Nyerere went ahead and named major streets in Tanzania after Biafra in protest against that monumental injustice of the genocidal killing of more than three million Africans under the command of Obasanjo and his hell-bent misrulers who cruelly declared that ‘all is fair in warfare’. Those iconic street names remain today in Tanzania while Obasanjo and his cursed fellow misgovernors abolished the historic name of the Bight of Biafra as if that will wipe away the evidence of their genocidal crimes against humanity. Today, simply flying the flag of Biafra in commemoration of the innocent dead in Nigeria (as is done in enlightened countries that use the opportunity to create flourishing tourist industries) will invite extra judicial killings that go on unabated.

If you are superstitious, you may point to the Igbo genocide as the cause of the curse that Obasanjo said was upon him and his class of ‘irresponsible’ marauders. The Bible commands that ‘Thou Shall Not Kill’ and I understand that the Koran teaches that ‘If you kill one of God’s children, you kill all of God’s children.’ What part of that commandment do self-accursed misrulers like Obasanjo and his ilk not understand? They did not just kill one or two or three of God’s children which is bad enough – they killed three million plus. And yet more than forty years later, they have not offered any apology and they have not offered any reparations. As Nigerians always say, God is not asleep, and so it is no surprise that Nigerian misrulers are a condemned bunch, from their own horse’s mouth. They are all going to burn in hell for their evil deeds, according to Obasanjo. Why not? Except that God is a loving and forgiving God, quite unlike the unrepentant tyrants who are only paranoid about their deserved place in the afterlife. Repent!

It is not only Nigerian tyrants that appear to be cursed due to what Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe relentlessly condemns as the foundational genocide of post-colonial Africa – the Igbo genocide. All the countries that facilitated that genocide have apparently also been cursed: The Soviet Union has vanished from the world map and its successor, Russia, continues to battle insurgents in some of its regions; the UK is about to be dismembered given the impending vote for independence by oil-rich Scotland which will probably be followed by Wales and by Northern Ireland all of which already have their devolved governments; and Egypt which provided the air force pilots that bombed Igbo women in market places during the war now appears to welcome the chickens back to its own roost as the same officers trained by Mubarak when he was the commander of the air force college during the Biafra war now devour their own people in the thousands. What goes around comes around also in Northern Nigeria where the pogrom against the Igbo started and in the Middle Belt where most the killings took place when train-loads of escapees were waylaid and slaughtered. But the native doctor who concocts diarrhea cannot hide his own buttocks in the sky according to an Igbo proverb because when the rain falls, it won’t fall on one man’s housetop, sang Bob Marley.

General Gowon who presided over that genocide has gone around the country asking people to pray for Nigeria. I wonder what kind of prayers Nigerians pray for their country. It is likely to be the same self-glorious prayer that they say on their televangelist call-ins when they always ask god to destroy their enemies. Rarely do Nigerians admit wrong-doing and ask for forgiveness of their sins. 

When Chinua Achebe tried to heal the sore-ridden conscience of the nation in There Was a Country, the unrepentant blood-thirsty tyrants that were still alive and their phantom ‘intellectual’ lackeys pretended to be offended by the objective truth and went on boasting that the genocide against the Igbo was justifiable. Gowon’s initial ignorant comment was that he ‘did not know if Achebe will be getting a penny from that book’, a baffling response from someone who holds a doctoral degree from a top UK university.

Of course, no genocide is ever justifiable and condemning genocide is not about getting pennies. Thus General Gowon who reacted emotionally to There Was A Country without reading a single page of the damning book, has recently started singing a different tune. Perhaps for the first time, he now admits that lots of innocent fellow Nigerians were killed and their properties destroyed due to the abuse of power during the war and that there is a need for justice to be done to our fellow citizens. Belatedly, Ohaneze Ndigbo has set up a reparations committee to seek the reparations that were demanded in the recommendations of the official Justice Oputa Panel report which President Obasanjo attempted to suppress but was unofficially published online.

It is tempting to agree with the superstition that Nigerians, nay Africans and people of African descent globally are cursed. I have heard highly educated Africans explore this hypothesis that everywhere black people are in power, nothing seems to work because, as a pejorative saying among Diaspora people of African descent puts it, black people can’t run snow. Some of the people who hold this mistaken belief yearn for the re-subjection of black people to the terror of oppressive white rule or direct colonialism as the panacea for the perceived ineptitude or wickedness of black misrulers. But history is not a mystery.

Personally, I do not agree that Nigeria is cursed, for as Ola Rotimi would put it, The Gods Are Not to Blame. There are historical and structural reasons why people of African descent are suffering the incompetent leadership that we are burdened with today.  As Obi Igwe put it in one of his gospel songs, what we need are leaders (Ndi ndu, also literally, forces of life) and not rulers (Ndi ochichi, also literally, forces of darkness). There are some concrete steps we can take to reverse the ineptitude at the leadership level and uplift our people from avoidable penury in the midst of plenty:

First, I call for a National Day of Igbo Mourning to be declared as a public holiday in memory of the millions who were genocidized in Biafra. During that day, every year, let all Nigerians embark on a general fasting and all the money saved on food and drinks should be donated to the Igbo reparations fund while parents will use the opportunity of the national demonstration of penance to teach future generations that what was done to the Igbo must not be allowed to happen again in Africa. This could be done also by using the day of mourning to promote history literacy through the communal reading of the history of the genocide.

Secondly, the Federal Government of Nigeria should allocate 100 billion naira every year for at least 40 years to the Fair Igbo Reparations Mandate (FIRM) as a token recognition of the inhumane crimes committed against our people by our own government. No group of Nigerians would lose anything when the government eventually recognizes that killing three million of our people was completely wrong and pays reparations. The amount suggested here annually is chicken feed compared to what one of these hell-bent misrulers steal with impunity relentlessly.

The Federal Government of Nigeria and Ohaneze Ndigbo should demand for the foreign countries that supported the genocide to contribute to the Fair Igbo Reparations Mandate because when this evil is recognized and forgiveness is requested through the token payment of reparations, the knock-on effects in the national conscience will yield a greater consideration for human life, create massive wealth that the cosmopolitan Igbo will spread across the country and across Africa for the benefit of all, and help to produce conscientious leaders who will help Nigerians and Africans to reach their full potentials.

Finally, Nigerians should follow the example of Nyerere, Nkrumah and Du Bois and recognize that evil against any African anywhere is not an internal affair of any country or state. Rather, we should fast forward the unification of Africa into the People’s Republic of Africa in a way similar to democracies of scale that are more viable because unity is strength. When Africa is finally united in a continental government, no single group of Africans will ever be able to wake up one morning, slap their buttocks, and embark on ethnic cleansing in Africa because the rest of us will rise to put an end to any attempted genocide in Africa by internal or external forces.

Morsi should Fire al-Sisi

By Biko Agozino

President Mohammed Morsi of Egypt was right in rejecting the ultimatum from the army chief for him and the opposition to reach a settlement in 48 hours or else the army would step in. If the army chief thought that the crisis could be resolved in 48 hours, he must be very mistaken. Talks about being on the side of the people and being ready to die for the people are expected from the military while the defiance of Morsi and his supporters to defend the popular mandate that was won in the election one year earlier is understandable. But there is no need for anyone to die, the ambitious army officers should resign and join political parties of their choice to pursue their leadership goals democratically (as Chavez did in Venezuela after serving time for his attempted coup) or they should be discharged. My recommendations are:

President Morsi should have fired the army chief, Colonel General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, for insubordination following his ultimatum of 48 hours before he toppled the democratically elected president. Morsi should have recalled Parliament immediately for it was never the intention of the voters that he should govern alone and given that as soon as he was sworn in, he did recall parliament but that was blocked by the constitutional court for some reason only for the head of the constitutional court to be imposed undemocratically as an interim president of the country. 

Egypt should initiate a constitutional assembly for the people to rewrite the constitution in line with the South African presidential system with multiple vice presidents and proportional representation; in line with the AU parliament's model 50-50 gender equity in representation if only to help halt the appalling sexual assaults against hundreds of Egyptian women in Tahir Square, apparently attacked by their fellow protesters; and in line with the US model of federalism with city, local government, state and federal levels of elected government protected by a professional military and facilitated by the separation of religion and the state, and by separation of powers, checks and balances among the executive, the judiciary and the legislature.

The US has announced more foreign aid to Egypt to help prevent the crisis from escalating into a civil war but President Obama should consider going beyond the threat to suspend the hefty $1.3 billion annual military aid if there is a coup or a semblance of a coup; it already quacks like a duck. Instead, the US should devote at least half the military aid to the funding of business start-ups for men, women and the masses of talented but unemployed youth as a better alternative to the wasteful spending on Africom and military aid. 

Promising more aid to help shore up democracy in Egypt is a sure sign that the announcement, by President Obama during his Cape Town University address, of a $7 billion package to ‘Power Africa’ is too paltry to make a significant impact. Rather, President Obama should raise his game plan by committing to allocate at least $100 billion yearly as reparations grants to African researchers, artists, farmers, schools, entrepreneurs, communities and for projects that would help to transform Africa for the better. Other countries that benefited from the African holocaust should be invited to contribute to such a reparations fund to enable Africans to fast forward to the African Union Government for the benefit of all Africans and for the benefit of the whole world.

The Egyptian military should support the redistribution of a huge chunk of their military aid to help fight poverty not just because their officers have announced that they are on the side of the people (as is always expected) but because they are not an army of occupation and should always be in support of the democratic mandate of the impoverished people. President Morsi, when he regains his mandate, should also amend the budget to provide annual grants of at least 10% of the budget that will be awarded directly to the people to support the research and development of enterprising ideas. The Egyptian army already runs small and medium-sized enterprises that should be handed over to cooperatives, communities and enterprising individuals.

The solution to a crisis of democracy is often more democracy rather than less democracy. The protesters cheering the military helicopters that flew the Egyptian flag over Liberation Square are not much different from citizens across the world who tend to cheer every military coup until it is clear, too late, that military dictatorship is not the solution to the crisis of democracy. When the people come out to demonstrate en-masse, it is not the crisis of democracy but the actualization of democracy in practice, according to Norm Chomsky.

Morsi deserves the opposition that his administration has earned after one year of a do-nothing one-man rule for he failed to insist on the recall of the elected parliament. However, there is a danger of turning Egypt into Algeria by using the military to fight an elected government with disastrous results for the people. Morsi deserves to be supported to serve his full term as an elected President unless he is recalled in another election but he must stop serving alone: recall the elected parliament now and make sure that 50% of the ministers will be women and representatives of popular organizations! The army is right in pledging that they would not support any plan to subvert the secular constitution of Egypt but the military coup is untenable and must be reversed.

There is no guarantee that the president of the constitutional court, 68-year old Adli Mansour, who was imposed by the military to take over from Morsi will have a magic wand to resolve the democratic and economic crisis at the root of the protests and a new presidential election could still be won by Mr. Mossi or his allies unless his critics unite and campaign for the next election in three years. Mr. Mahmoud should defy the military and hand over back to Morsi who should recall parliament and include more women in government.

Every cook can govern, wrote C.L.R. James, following Lenin. This is because in a democratic election, whoever is elected is supported to serve the people and if the person is perceived to be failing the people, then there could be a recall election as was the case in the governorships of California (successful) and Wisconsin (unsuccessful, with some elected representatives defeated in the recall election) or the people could wait and elect a new chief executive and new legislative representatives at the next election. Having struggled for decades under military rule before being given the chance of electing a government of their choice for the first time, the people of Egypt should wait three more years to re-elect or throw out the candidates at the next election and put in a clause of term limits if they do not have one already. The authoritarian populism of the military is the good intention with which the road to hell is paved.

The African philosophy of non-violence should be the guide for the protesters and for the government in Egypt. The right to protest must be defended by the government while the people must support the democratic process instead of yearning for a dictatorship. Mob rule and individual rule were the extreme reasons why Aristotle preferred the system of aristocracy as a golden mean compared to the systems of democracy and monarchy but the Egyptians are not asking for mob rule nor for the rule of the individual, they appear to be all pro-democracy (supporters and opponents of Morsi alike) even if the opposition forces paradoxically see the military coup option as a facilitator of increased democratization while the supporters of the Morsi regime rightly insist on the right of the parties and individuals with the democratic mandate to serve their term of office. There is no need for clashing supporters and opponents to continue killing Egyptians on the streets.